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Blender sculpt demo - 45 million polygons!

54

Demo by nutelZ on a C2Q6600 @ 2.95GHZ, Geforce 8600GT

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

54 Comments

  1. Nevertheless Blenders RAM handling is bad!
    When importing a 6 Million poly Mesh it crashes and until that takes too much RAM (about 1GB more than f.e. Maya!). This is about the 64bit version!!
    How much RAM took this sculpting?

  2. Pretty Insane, this makes very high detail Models possible, love this one ! And yes 45440768 Poly seem to be at least 45 Million ^^ Iam very happy to see blender have a really reliable sculpting mode now ! Only thing we need lastly is Micropoly Displacement to get those Details on our low Polymodels in a good way !

    Greetings
    chubaso

  3. Campbell Barton (ideasman42) on

    @Snicsnac, what file format were you importing?

    Also be aware that blender with multires uses a lot less ram then making a mesh like this in editmode.
    If you want UV's Vertex colors, etc on each one of 45 million faces it must increase memory.

  4. Impressive ... but really strange.

    I have exactly the same computer as NutelZ (Proc and GFX card) and editing is really slow when i reach 2 Millions polys.

    I make several tests using VBO or not and swicth to different "Window Draw Methods" ... same results :o(

    Tested with 32 and 64 bits build ...

  5. Hi Bart

    This is verry impressive. I didnt know the improvements for sculpting came this far. Il have to check out the latest build from the sculpt branch.

    Like others id like to know what your system specs are.

  6. Hi! very impressive.
    I was wondering tough, how can that detail be rendered. If blender has no Micro-polygon displacement, and even if it had you would need a displacement map much bigger than 4096x4096 = 16777216 pixels-polygons, you would need a 6700x6700 map, wich I think, Blender don´t supports. And even if it did, what would be the rendering time for that monster??
    So my question is, Is anybody working on efficient methods for rendering this kind of resource-eaters-megapolygon-beast? or is this just for showcase?

  7. those improvements are really great - unfortunately though, the new sculpt system is slower for me since I do have a macbook with just 2GB RAM and shared memory graphics (Intel GMA x3100). The old sculptcode is faster for sculpting but the new code even allows me to subdivide up to 25 Million Polygons without crashing (1284 MB RAM used for this). Too bad I didn't spend a little more money when I bought the mac.

  8. Yeah...just make sure you don't press SUBDIVIDE after those 32-46 million polys or there will be hell to pay, disk trashing from here to eternity, graphic wiped off from your screen, garbled pixels everywhere and a mouse that decelerate to a standstill - until you have to pull the power plug ;o)

    Other than that - fantastic improvements!

  9. I have loaded a lowpoly model (obj) and use the multiresolution-modifier.
    With dual XEON + 8GB RAM + Quadro FX3700 and subdivided to 23Mio polys you cannot work properly!
    It takes 4GB of RAM!
    Sorry guys, but thats ridiculous!

  10. I test it and it is working well, but i have a doubt. Anybody know how to apply multiresolution-modifier to a specific area? (sory for my poor english)

  11. A trick to speed up things A LOT, is *Not to use the default cube*.

    Instead of the default cube with 10 multires subdivisions, try a base mesh with around 100 or 200 faces.

    Or you can subdivide the default cube 4 times with Subdivision modifier, then *Apply*, and then use Multires modifier.

    The speed bost with that "trick" is amazing in here, and I have a pretty old PC.

    EDIT: oooohhh, and I forgot, also use orthogonal view, NOT perspective.

    And as final touch: use smooth shading for all faces.

  12. Nice work guys. People keep posting that it's not 45 million polys but I watched the whole vid to the end and it shows 45,440,768 faces. That looks like it is pushing a bit more than 45 million polys.

    Thanks for the updates to Blender. While this may not be the ideal setup that so many people here seem to need, it does show that Blender is progressing along.

    Interesting enough Blender 2.48a was good enough to do this:
    http://www.youtube.com/PonderStudios#p/u/0/NmHIUFIKw-E

    I think it will be amazing as the devs begin to add more to 2.5. Thanks for all your hard work and many of us are looking positively to the future of Blender.

  13. to all of those people who look at the wire frame and say that isn't 45million polys, that is because the modifier is in Optimal draw mode, where it only shows the base meshes wire.

  14. Weird, I have a higher end machine than the one in this video (i7 920 3.2 GHz GTX 285 2 GB) and sculpting becomes completely unusable at about 5-6 million polys. I'm using VBOS, Optimal Draw, Fast Navigate... Are there any other settings I can tweak to improve performance?

  15. I really wonder how I should configure my upcoming workstation to make this work... I was going for 2 Xeon [email protected] Ghz with 24 Gb Ram
    Plus a midrange Quadro, but I think I'll wait a few more months! I need beautiful Blender specs...

  16. Eh! Thats insane amount of polygons. I wonder how will it goes to low spec computers though cause mine is way lower.

    @starclopsofish: what build of Blender are you using?

  17. @Keri: Thanks for that info, I could only get up to 1 million polys with the default cube, now that I know to have a more detailed base mesh, I can get over 6 million! ... on my 6 year-old computer! The work on multi-res/sculpting is really great :)

  18. I really want to know how to use custom textures as brushes..

    It's the only thing holding me back from trying it for a project. I just can't figure out how to get the textures in as brushes. The video only makes it more mysterious by not showing how he does it.

  19. crass wangenstein on

    WHAT THE F_CK BUILD IS HE USING

    This video is USELESS without information about what BLENDER VERSION is being used

    I can get 2 MIL - EXACTLY THE SAME AS 2.49 - and none of the advanced drawing settings show up on the 2.5 ALPHA 0 BUILD LINKED TO FROM BLENDER.ORG

    WHAT BUILD IS USED HERE?

  20. wow... I just had my computer up to 67 million.. But it wasnt so smooth... in fact didnt work... wonder how he got to 47 million. I went from 16 mil to 67 mil

  21. @ibkanat
    That's huge amount of faces. If you are subdividing the default cube, check my first post here for a couple of tips to speed things up. And if it works for you pls let us know.

  22. """Drawing speed is drastically improved by keeping the mesh on the GPU"""

    how does that work if the graphics ram isn't big enough for the mesh? just curious....

  23. :O awesome!!!
    this build has openmp enabled?
    how can i enable openmp from scons user-config.py file?
    i added the line "WITH_BF_OPENMP = 'true' " and installed the openmp dev packages, but the build seems to be unaffected :(...

  24. I went to 100 000 000 polys but sculpt mode is slow on my machine even without multires I have terrible lags I think its a bug.

  25. I can now sculpt over 32 million polys on my < $800 laptop! HP Compaq 8710w.
    Intel t9500 core2 duo. Win 7 pro x64. 4GB ram, NVIDIA Quadro FX 1600M.

  26. Here with only 1.5GB of RAM, a Sempron 3000+, and GForce FX5200. (quite old PC!), I got more than 14 million polys and fast strokes.

    I used as Base mesh a Grid with 120x120 quads. And Multires with 5 levels.

    EDIT:

    Some settings I also used:
    - In Preferences: only 4 levels of Undo and set the memory for Undo to 25MB.
    - Orthogonal view, for fast stroke speed.
    - Used "Save External" in Multires modifier.
    - 0 Levels for "Preview" option in Multires modifier.

  27. For only thinking to get a 45m polys mesh... my pc, dont know how, pop up a message that say´s "came on men..."

    jajajajaja, if i get past 1.5m with fluid work flow im lucky XD.

  28. I can get 6M polys on my old Pentium 4, its not very usable sculpting, but it can still show it at a decent frame rate. Its usable at 1.5M though.

    EDIT: scratch that, used Keri's tips and 6M is quite usable, its the 24M I got to look out for. Heres me specs:
    Pentium 4, 3 Ghz HT
    1 GB DDR
    ATI HD Radeon 2400 PRO

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